comparison
reachpad vs Vercel
Vercel is where a finished build goes. reachpad is where an unfinished app lives while you and your agents keep changing it. The two overlap on one thing, a link someone else can open, and disagree about everything on either side of it.
Side by side
| Vercel | reachpad | |
|---|---|---|
| What you give it | A repository and a build command | A workspace where the app was written and is running |
| What the link points at | An immutable deployment of one commit | The process running in the workspace right now |
| How a change reaches the link | Push, build, deploy, usually under a minute | The dev server reloads, or the agent restarts it |
| Where the database lives | Elsewhere: a managed Postgres, a KV store, a partner integration | On the workspace disk, or elsewhere if you point it there |
| Long-running processes | Serverless and edge functions with execution limits; a persistent worker lives somewhere else | Any process, for as long as the workspace is active |
| Who can open the link | Anyone, or team members with deployment protection on | Anyone signed in to reachpad who has the link |
| Custom domain and CDN | Yes, that is the product | No |
| Which agents | None built in; agents work in your repo and push | Claude Code and Codex preinstalled, or anything you install |
Vercel's own description of its platform is at vercel.com/docs. The rows above describe it as documented on 23 August 2026.
The difference that matters
Vercel is built around the deploy step. Everything it does well, previews per branch, rollbacks, a CDN in front, a domain with a certificate, follows from treating each deployment as an immutable artifact of one commit. That is the right model for software with users who must not see a half-finished change.
reachpad is built around not having a deploy step. The app that Claude Code wrote ten minutes ago is running in the workspace with its SQLite file and its .env, and the link is that process. There is no build to fail, no environment variable to copy across, and no second place the app has to be made to work. The cost is that there is also no immutable version: what the link shows is whatever is running.
A common shape is both. The app lives in a workspace while it is small and changing, five people open it through the port link, and when it stops changing it gets a Vercel project and a domain. The workspace holds an ordinary git repository, so that move is a push plus an afternoon rebuilding the parts the workspace carried for free.
When Vercel is the right answer
When the software has users who are not on your team, needs a domain, or must not change under someone's feet. When the app is a Next.js site and its data is already in a managed store. When a preview URL per pull request is the review workflow. If that is the software you are shipping, deploy it, and use reachpad for the internal tools that never earned a pipeline.
Trying reachpad
166 hours 40 minutes of agent work is shared across up to 10 workspaces, with no card required. The quickstart is six commands and the last one is a link you can send.
Checked against published documentation on 23 August 2026. Something out of date or unfair? The other comparisons, or this page as raw markdown: /compare/vercel.md